LGBTQ Breaking News Service

GLASTONBURY, Ct.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Payrailz®, a digital payments company offering smarter, more engaging payment experiences to banks and credit unions across the United States, announced that Liberty Bank of Middletown, CT, one of the largest mutual banks in the country, has selected Payrailz’ full platform to power its digital payments vision.

Liberty Bank, in its effort to continually raise the bar when it comes to delivering extraordinary customer experiences, recognized that its customers want a more personalized, proactive and engaging payments experience. They will be deploying Payrailz’ full platform of intelligent and sophisticated payment technology, including consumer and business bill pay, bill negotiation services, P2P and A2A money transfer services.

According to BCG’s 2020 Retail Banking Advisory Survey, 37% of respondents want their bank to be more like Amazon, followed by an additional 29% of respondents who want their bank to be more like a personal shopper. To achieve a greater level of personalization that meets these expectations, Liberty Bank conducted a nationwide evaluation and chose to work with Payrailz.

Bank executives cited Payrailz’ innovative payments platform that leverages modern AI and machine learning technology as keys to being able to offer personalized experiences to their customers. The bank also anticipates being able to roll out proactive and actionable recommendations to customers to help them better manage their finances with a key focus on financial wellness.

“At Liberty Bank we pride ourselves on our ability to drive continuous innovation in our digital engagement. Our goal isn’t just to keep pace with current trends; our goal is to offer a money movement experience that sets us apart from the abundance of competition, from large money center banks, to the new Fintech players. Payrailz’ revolutionary payments platform will be the foundation for Liberty to execute on our payments vision now and into the future,” said David Mitchell, EVP, GM, and Chief Digital Officer at Liberty Bank.

“Liberty Bank is an industry recognized leader that is constantly making incredible strides toward innovation. We love working with banks like Liberty who share our vision to constantly push forward and not become complacent with their payment solutions,” said Fran Duggan, CEO of Payrailz. “Liberty embraces technology to provide exceptional service to its customers particularly in today’s ‘Do It for Me’ driven culture. We are proud that they selected Payrailz and our single platform to offer a payments experience that prioritizes ease of use, personalization, actionable insights and helps their customer better manage their financial health.”

About Liberty Bank

Established in 1825, Liberty Bank is Connecticut’s largest mutual bank with more than $7 billion in assets and 62 banking offices across Connecticut. As a full-service financial institution, Liberty offers consumer and commercial banking, cash management, home mortgages, business loans, insurance and investment services. Named a ‘Top Workplace’ for nine consecutive years, Liberty maintains a longstanding commitment to superior personal service and unparalleled community involvement. For more information about Liberty Bank, visit www.liberty-bank.com.

About Payrailz®

Payrailz is a digital payments company offering advanced payment capabilities and experiences including consumer and business bill pay, external and internal transfers, new account funding, P2P, B2B, B2C and other related solutions to banks and credit unions. In a society that increasingly has become focused on a “do it for me” culture, Payrailz’ smart technology makes the difference. Payrailz creates smarter payment experiences for the financial services industry that are predictive and more engaging than currently available alternatives. Financial institutions can confidently embrace Payrailz’ API-first and cloud-native technology engine, to offer unique payment solutions to their consumers and businesses. Payrailz helps financial institutions meet the payment expectations of today and the payment innovation needs of tomorrow. For more information, visit payrailz.com, follow them on Twitter @Payrailz, Facebook or LinkedIn, or contact Mickey Goldwasser at 860.430.9245.

It all started with a distinct ping. And by distinct ping, we mean a Grindr message.

“It was on this app that, for the first time ever, some white guy greeted me by saying, ‘Hola papi,'” John Paul Brammer writes in his memoir, out Tuesday, that was inspired by this message and his advice column of the same name.

The mixed-race Mexican-American writer created the column several years ago and channeled the format into an essay-filled memoir “¡Hola Papi! How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons” (Simon & Schuster, 206 pp.). Expect, above all else, vulnerability.

Menacing middle school bullies who prompt Brammer’s suicidal thoughts. A “one that got away”-style love story. And as the sub-headline in the title suggests: Coming out in a Walmart parking lot. Consider it par for the author’s meandering-but-methodical course.

“I love the idea of portraying what’s going through someone’s mind, the moment they make a decision, or the moment that they experience an emotion,” Brammer, who is from rural Oklahoma but now lives in Brooklyn, New York, tells USA TODAY. “I just really like putting those things into words, because I think that’s the most ambitious, beautiful thing that language can really do, it can sort of put someone else into the experience or the life of someone else. And I like using my own life to that end, because I think that’s so intimate.”

Hmm:Is coming out as a member of the LGBTQ community over? No, but it could be someday.

How the column ¡Hola Papi! became a memoir

¡Hola Papi! has lived at a series of different companies and publications including queer dating app Grindr (yes, the irony), Condé Nast, Out Magazine and now at Substack (and is syndicated in The Cut).

“That’s not so much a reflection of my commitment issues, which I do have, but more of a reflection of instability in the media world,” he says.

Brammer wasn’t sure if letters would ever come in when he launched the column, but oh boy, did they.

A sampling of recent ones: “How do I stop comparing myself to other people?” “Papi, am I secretly hideous?” “Papi, can I be proud of where I’m from? Even if it sucks?”

That said, the column is known to be “notoriously unhinged,” Brammer says. Nothing beats his favorite letter from a man whose boyfriend was pretending to be Colombian. “I reread it three times thinking, ‘How did I get such a gem in my inbox?'” he says with a laugh. (He advised they break up.)

Brammer structured his memoir as a series of advice columns to pay tribute to the column.

“I’ve always thought of it as a vehicle for my writing, and not my biggest aspiration in life or anything, but I wanted to pay homage to the format and the medium, because I’m so thankful for it and there’s no guarantee that I would have found the readers that I did,” he says.

Oooh:The gay royal romance novel is having a moment: ‘Everybody deserves a happy ending’

On writing about your life: ‘You should know how you feel about it, but you often don’t’

Brammer sticks to the old adage: Write what you know.

“If I’m writing about something, it pretty much means I’m at peace with it,” he says.

“I’m not one of those people – and I really admire these people – who haven’t quite figured out how they feel about something and they use writing to help them figure it out, almost like in the process of writing it so it helps them realize, ‘Oh, okay, these are my feelings.'”

He tenses up otherwise. “I find it difficult to write about things that I haven’t quite figured out or that I’m still struggling with or that still bring me anxiety or fear,” he says.

To that end, the book offers zoomed-in snapshots into Brammer’s life as opposed to a panoramic view. He details one incident of sexual assault, for example, but chose to not include an incident where the first official man he started dating raped him.

“I wanted to write that story so badly but at the end of the day, I find him to be such an uninteresting person,” Brammer says. “And I find that whole experience was really heavy and intense, yes, but I couldn’t quite feel the emotional intensity I was looking for that I needed to write something about it.”

Brammer joked with his friends about it a few days later, then realized he needed to take it seriously – only to bury it, and once again revisit it years later.

“It’s such a weird, interesting activity to look back at the facts of your own life, which, obviously, you’re the expert, you live through it, you should know how you feel about it, but you often don’t,” he says. “Social trends and conversations and culture can re-contextualize how you see the facts of your own life. And that’s something that’s very uncomfortable to acknowledge because we want to feel like we have a good handle on the things that have happened to us, and that we know our own story. But with new information comes reshuffling of the narratives. And that’s often a painful process, it’s often very fraught.”

Please and thank you:10 new LGBTQ books to celebrate Pride Month: Gay ‘Great Gatsby,’ ‘Queer Bible,’ more

Brammer is already at work on his next book

Brammer misses his pre-pandemic writing routine. And we may have missed out on more quality quillwork from the author.

“Not being able to work in coffee shops has – I’m not going to say that it’s robbed this country of some cultural treasures, but maybe so, because I haven’t been able to write the way I have been for a year and a half now, because I just can’t sit my butt in a coffee shop,” he says.

Brammer is starting on his next book now, which is a fictional take on a chapter that didn’t make it into the memoir about his first gay house party when he was still coming to terms with himself.

“It’s all coming together a little bit right now, just throwing words to a Google doc and seeing if they stick,” he says. “If it works, I’d be really happy. If it doesn’t, I’ll move on to something else.”

Our advice? Devour whatever Brammer cooks up.

If you are a survivor of sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit hotline.rainn.org/online and receive confidential support.

The Trevor Project helps LGBTQ+ people struggling with thoughts of suicide at 866-488-7386 or text 678-678.

The LGBT National Help Center National Hotline can be reached at 1-888-843-4564.

If you or someone you know may be struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can call the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) any time day or night, or chat online.

Crisis Text Line also provides free, 24/7, confidential support via text message to people in crisis when they dial 741741.

Noted:What if ‘The Great Gatsby’ was unquestionably queer? This author went there

Democratic candidates for Governor of Virginia debate at Virginia State University on April 6, 2021.Steve Helber/AP

On most Tuesdays for the last five years, a gaggle of protesters have regularly gathered on a grassy hillside along a main drag in Sterling, Virginia, a far-flung suburb northwest of Washington, DC. In the early days of the Trump administration, as many as 40 people would congregate, brandishing signs that criticized former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Virginia) for her voting record that aligned almost perfectly with the positions of President Donald Trump. Some of their work, combined with efforts from an army of freshly enraged grassroots activists, led to the success of Democrat Jennifer Wexton, then a Virginia state senator, who defeated Comstock in the 2018 midterms. As Trump’s reelection bid loomed, the protests continued—particularly, in support of the Movement for Black Lives in the wake of George Floyd’s murder last summer.

In the months since President Joe Biden defeated Trump in Virginia, a much smaller group showed up to the usual spot, and the signs they carried have strayed from being missives of discontent. “The message was more like ‘Call this number to get vaccinated,’ different things like that,” Lana Reed, a leader of Sterling’s local Indivisible group, tells me.

After all, there’s not much for Virginia Democrats to gripe about. The party took control of the governor’s mansion in 2017 and flipped the General Assembly two years later, delivering Richmond entirely into Democrats’ control. Since then, state lawmakers have passed some of the most progressive reforms in the country, including abolishing the death penalty, enacting sweeping voting rights reforms, and raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour. Both the presidential and the off-year state elections had been a measure of the revulsion Trump’s victory inspired among broad swaths of the electorate. And Democrats’ success in Virginia during those off-year state elections, heralded as a bellwether by political watchers, foreshadowed the realignments of both major political parties during Trump’s tenure.

But now what? Trump, of course, is no longer the president, which is both a cause for relief but also concern among Democrats who relied on anti-Trump fervor to propel the party’s recent successes. But the nation’s first statewide Democratic party of the President Joe Biden era shows that the Trump hangover didn’t disappear after the new president’s inauguration. There have never been this many Democrats running for state office in Virginia in recent history, but polling, political experts, and trends suggest voters are eager to stick with the status quo.

A crowded field has emerged in the fight for the governor’s mansion—including two candidates, former state delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy and state Sen. Jennifer McClellan, vying to be the first Black woman governor in US history. Ditto the lieutenant governors’ race with its six Democratic hopefuls, one of whom may succeed to be Virginia’s first Muslim, or Hispanic, or Jewish, or openly gay official to be elected statewide. Fourteen of the 55 Democrats in the House of Delegates have a primary challenge; during the last primary elections in 2019 only four faced a primary opponent. 

There’s a straightforward explanation for Democrats’ increased interest in running for state office. “With a majority in Richmond, a lot of Democrats are inclined to think the office is worth having,” says Stephen Farnsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington and an expert in Virginia politics. With a unified Democratic majority for the first time in a quarter decade, the party’s priorities are moving through the General Assembly with ease. Chaz Nuttycombe, the director of Virginia-based election forecaster CNalysis, explains, “Democrats wouldn’t be in the majority in the Virginia House if Trump had lost in 2016.”

But all of that robust interest still tends to favor the known quantity. Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton associate who previously served as governor from 2014 through 2018—but was barred from immediately seeking reelection by Virginia’s unusual incumbency laws—has been heavily favored to replace Gov. Ralph Northam since he entered the race in December. A recent Roanoke College poll found half of Democratic voters are backing him—more than four times the number who said they’re supporting Carroll Foy, who garnered just 11 percent of support. Nuttycombe expects that most of the incumbent Democratic state lawmakers also will prevail on Tuesday.

McAuliffe benefits from what is, effectively, incumbent status, with the advantage of name recognition and experience none of the other candidates possess. But the instinct to choose him again is another lingering effect of Trump’s presidency, says veteran Democratic strategist Joe Trippi. He likens Virginia’s Democratic primary voters to their counterparts in California in 2010, when they chose Jerry Brown as their gubernatorial candidate after eight years of Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “They wanted someone who could run the damn governors’ office,” Trippi explains, “who knew where the damn light switch was.”

It’s the same impulse—“Give me the old shoe,” as Trippi puts it—that drove Democratic primary voters to Biden in 2020 after they flirted with every flavor of Democrat in another historically diverse field. In early 2019, Virginia Democrats suffered the added misery of multiple scandals in Richmond when a photograph of Northam donning blackface in college surfaced—just as lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax, who is also running for governor, faced accusations of sexual assault.

But the scandals never gained sustained traction facing the headwinds of Trumpism, and Democrats continued to thrive, leading to 2021’s broad, diverse field. “The bench of people running in Virginia is so much deeper and more diverse than it’s ever been in my lifetime,” Tom Perriello, a former Democratic Virginia congressman who ran to the left of Northam during the 2017 primary, tells me. Candidates “are not waiting to be the future of the Democratic Party in Virginia, regardless of whether they sit in the legislature, advocacy groups, or statewide office.”

The range of ideas has continued to force the party leftward—even if the candidates proffering those ideas don’t survive their primaries. The 2017 gubernatorial primary offers a precedent for progressive policies flourishing in Virginia in part as the legacy of past Trump-era primaries. Northam, for example, closed the gap between himself and Perriello by adding several of his rival’s reforms, such as a $15 minimum wage and debt-free community college, to his platform. Versions of both proposals became law once Democrats took control of the legislature.

McAuliffe faces “a new generation of candidates,” says Atima Omara, a Democratic political consultant based in Virginia, ones with “a more progressive vision for American that is multiracial and multiethnic.” For example, Carroll Foy has staked out a lane to McAuliffe’s left, while McClellan has called herself a “practical progressive.” Neither have taken up the mantle of the Squad, but their positions have forced McAuliffe to react accordingly. During his last stint in the governor’s mansion, he promised to “always going to come down on the side of law enforcement;” these days, he emphasizes his achievement as governor to restore the voting rights of more than 150,000 convicted felons. He also refused to accept campaign money from Dominion Energy, the Virginia utility behemoth and major political donor—a source of funds more of the Commonwealth’s Democrats have been swearing off as the party moves leftward.

Omara compares McAuliffe’s approach to Biden’s. Just as the president came into the Democratic presidential primary as a more moderate voice but shifted toward more progressive stances, so too has McAuliffe. “The changing electorate has moved Terry McAuliffe to respond to economic and racial justice,” Omara says. “He’s much more obliged to respond to that than he was before.”

In the end, Virginia may no longer claim its status a bellwether for much of anything anymore, Trippi says. Its increasingly blue tinge with each passing election since Obama’s 2008 victory has all but eliminated its swing-state status. And while Trump probably accelerated Virginia’s moves to the left, those changes had already been underway, explains Annie Weinberg, a veteran elections strategist who has advised Virginia candidates and voter turnout efforts. She points to the “electorate-transforming” campaigns won by candidates of color, such as current and former Dels. Carroll Foy, Elizabeth Guzmán, and Hala Ayala, all of whom organized voters who hadn’t received regular attention from party officials. “Some of these shifts are happening over the long term and are divorced from the Trump effect,” Weinberg says.  “It’s not just about people being energized to go out and fight him.”

The open question now is whether grassroots activism stays strong. Reed, of Sterling’s local Indivisible group, is preparing for what happens after Tuesday, when she and her fellow activists will begin filling in the names of the primary winners on get-out-the-vote postcards they’ve already penned for November’s general election. As for those protests? They’ve ceased entirely. But who knows for how long. “If an issue comes up that we want people to act on,” Reed says, “it will start again.”

Democratic candidates for Governor of Virginia debate at Virginia State University on April 6, 2021.Steve Helber/AP

On most Tuesdays for the last five years, a gaggle of protesters have regularly gathered on a grassy hillside along a main drag in Sterling, Virginia, a far-flung suburb northwest of Washington, DC. In the early days of the Trump administration, as many as 40 people would congregate, brandishing signs that criticized former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Virginia) for her voting record that aligned almost perfectly with the positions of President Donald Trump. Some of their work, combined with efforts from an army of freshly enraged grassroots activists, led to the success of Democrat Jennifer Wexton, then a Virginia state senator, who defeated Comstock in the 2018 midterms. As Trump’s reelection bid loomed, the protests continued—particularly, in support of the Movement for Black Lives in the wake of George Floyd’s murder last summer.

In the months since President Joe Biden defeated Trump in Virginia, a much smaller group showed up to the usual spot, and the signs they carried have strayed from being missives of discontent. “The message was more like ‘Call this number to get vaccinated,’ different things like that,” Lana Reed, a leader of Sterling’s local Indivisible group, tells me.

After all, there’s not much for Virginia Democrats to gripe about. The party took control of the governor’s mansion in 2017 and flipped the General Assembly two years later, delivering Richmond entirely into Democrats’ control. Since then, state lawmakers have passed some of the most progressive reforms in the country, including abolishing the death penalty, enacting sweeping voting rights reforms, and raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour. Both the presidential and the off-year state elections had been a measure of the revulsion Trump’s victory inspired among broad swaths of the electorate. And Democrats’ success in Virginia during those off-year state elections, heralded as a bellwether by political watchers, foreshadowed the realignments of both major political parties during Trump’s tenure.

But now what? Trump, of course, is no longer the president, which is both a cause for relief but also concern among Democrats who relied on anti-Trump fervor to propel the party’s recent successes. But the nation’s first statewide Democratic party of the President Joe Biden era shows that the Trump hangover didn’t disappear after the new president’s inauguration. There have never been this many Democrats running for state office in Virginia in recent history, but polling, political experts, and trends suggest voters are eager to stick with the status quo.

A crowded field has emerged in the fight for the governor’s mansion—including two candidates, former state delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy and state senator Jennifer McClellan, vying to be the first Black woman governor in US history. Ditto the lieutenant governors’ race with its six Democratic hopefuls, one of whom may succeed to be Virginia’s first Muslim, or Hispanic, or Jewish, or openly gay official to be elected statewide. Fourteen of the 55 Democrats in the House of Delegates have a primary challenge; during the last primary elections in 2019 only four faced a primary opponent. 

There’s a straightforward explanation for Democrats’ increased interest in running for state office. “With a majority in Richmond, a lot of Democrats are inclined to think the office is worth having,” says Stephen Farnsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington and an expert in Virginia politics. With a unified Democratic majority for the first time in a quarter decade, the party’s priorities are moving through the General Assembly with ease. Chaz Nuttycombe, the director of Virginia-based election forecaster CNalysis, explains, “Democrats wouldn’t be in the majority in the Virginia House if Trump had lost in 2016.”

But all of that robust interest still tends to favor the known quantity. Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton associate who previously served as governor from 2014 through 2018—but was barred from immediately seeking reelection by Virginia’s unusual incumbency laws—has been heavily favored to replace Gov. Ralph Northam since he entered the race in December. A recent Roanoke College poll found half of Democratic voters are backing him—more than four times the number who said they’re supporting Carroll Foy, who garnered just 11 percent of support. Nuttycombe expects that most of the incumbent Democratic state lawmakers also will prevail on Tuesday.

McAuliffe benefits from what is, effectively, incumbent status, with the advantage of name recognition and experience none of the other candidates possess. But the instinct to choose him again is another lingering effect of Trump’s presidency, says veteran Democratic strategist Joe Trippi. He likens Virginia’s Democratic primary voters to their counterparts in California in 2010, when they chose Jerry Brown as their gubernatorial candidate after eight years of Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “They wanted someone who could run the damn governors’ office,” Trippi explains, “who knew where the damn light switch was.”

It’s the same impulse—“Give me the old shoe,” as Trippi puts it—that drove Democratic primary voters to Biden in 2020 after they flirted with every flavor of Democrat in another historically diverse field. In early 2019, Virginia Democrats suffered the added misery of multiple scandals in Richmond when a photograph of Northam donning blackface in college surfaced—just as lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax, who is also running for governor, faced accusations of sexual assault.

But the scandals never gained sustained traction facing the headwinds of Trumpism, and Democrats continued to thrive, leading to 2021’s broad, diverse field. “The bench of people running in Virginia is so much deeper and more diverse than it’s ever been in my lifetime,” Tom Perriello, a former Democratic Virginia congressman who ran to the left of Northam during the 2017 primary, tells me. Candidates “are not waiting to be the future of the Democratic Party in Virginia, regardless of whether they sit in the legislature, advocacy groups, or statewide office.”

The range of ideas has continued to force the party leftward—even if the candidates proffering those ideas don’t survive their primaries. The 2017 gubernatorial primary offers a precedent for progressive policies flourishing in Virginia in part as the legacy of past Trump-era primaries. Northam, for example, closed the gap between himself and Perriello by adding several of his rival’s reforms, such as a $15 minimum wage and debt-free community college, to his platform. Versions of both proposals became law once Democrats took control of the legislature.

McAuliffe faces “a new generation of candidates,” says Atima Omara, a Democratic political consultant based in Virginia, ones with “a more progressive vision for American that is multiracial and multiethnic.” For example, Carroll Foy has staked out a lane to McAuliffe’s left, while McClellan has called herself a “practical progressive.” Neither have taken up the mantle of the Squad, but their positions have forced McAuliffe to react accordingly. During his last stint in the governor’s mansion, he promised to “always going to come down on the side of law enforcement;” these days, he emphasizes his achievement as governor to restore the voting rights of more than 150,000 convicted felons. He also refused to accept campaign money from Dominion Energy, the Virginia utility behemoth and major political donor—a source of funds more of the Commonwealth’s Democrats have been swearing off as the party moves leftward.

Omara compares McAuliffe’s approach to Biden’s. Just as the president came into the Democratic presidential primary as a more moderate voice but shifted toward more progressive stances, so too has McAuliffe. “The changing electorate has moved Terry McAuliffe to respond to economic and racial justice,” Omara says. “He’s much more obliged to respond to that than he was before.”

In the end, Virginia may no longer claim its status a bellwether for much of anything anymore, Trippi says. Its increasingly blue tinge with each passing election since Obama’s 2008 victory has all but eliminated its swing-state status. And while Trump probably accelerated Virginia’s moves to the left, those changes had already been underway, explains Annie Weinberg, a veteran elections strategist who has advised Virginia candidates and voter turnout efforts. She points to the “electorate-transforming” campaigns won by candidates of color, such as current and former Dels. Carroll Foy, Elizabeth Guzmán, and Hala Ayala, all of whom organized voters who hadn’t received regular attention from party officials. “Some of these shifts are happening over the long term and are divorced from the Trump effect,” Weinberg says.  “It’s not just about people being energized to go out and fight him.”

The open question now is whether grassroots activism stays strong. Reed, of Sterling’s local Indivisible group, is preparing for what happens after Tuesday, when she and her fellow activists will begin filling in the names of the primary winners on get-out-the-vote postcards they’ve already penned for November’s general election. As for those protests? They’ve ceased entirely. But who knows for how long. “If an issue comes up that we want people to act on,” Reed says, “it will start again.”